I'm using the Module::Build approach which seems to do a decent job of the basics. However, at the module level I would expect some things were a little easier. Like installing files to a custom place, like /var/www/html.

It's even harder with ExtUtils::MakeMaker. That's probably the reason I'm going to switch to Module::Build.

"When we finally get to the stage where nearly everyone is using CPAN/CPANPLUS (or some similar system of automatically dealing with dependencies, e.g. Debian's debs via apt-get), then life will get much easier for CPAN authors..."
Aren't you already there? Who isn't using package systems that automatically know how to resolve things?

Yes I am certainly already there, but if you release some modules on CPAN you'll discover that not everyone is. There's just enough set-up hassles for CPAN/CPANPLUS (e.g. finding a good set of mirror sites to use) that a lot people haven't done this -- I don't know how many, but clearly quite a few haven't.

The biggest unsolved problem with CPAN.pm and CPANPLUS.pm, in my opinion, would be the occasional breakage of deps, and almost as bad, asking the user irritating questions.
I don't care if it needs to chug for an hour, I don't want it to chug for an hour and then to hang-up on something.

And further, it's a little hard to see how these problems can be fixed without a centralized agency in charge of cleaning them up (e.g a distro centered on perl?). Possibly the perl world needs to borrow a page from Debian and get a little more fanatic about defining and demanding adherence to Policy.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other